Books like Captain Underpants and the Attack of the Talking Toilets

You know, I almost don’t want to admit it, but I enjoyed Captain Underpants. Not to the point that I feel like I need to read another one, but certainly more than I expected. George and Harold are two bright yet… precocious young men who write their own comic books about a character they call Captain Underpants. Due to some accident that occurs in the first Captain Underpants book, their principal is occasionally hypnotized to believe he is Captain Underpants, during which time he sheds his clothes and his toupee and runs around the school in his tightie-whities with a curtain tied around his neck. The books have lots of drawings, including a few pages of George and Harold’s actual comic book, as well a “flip pages” where the action is entirely in pictures. However, I found the text to have some challenging vocabulary (when reading with my Reading Buddy, Bradley, we looked up “defiantly” and “gullible” in the dictionary, and I defined “toupee”), some important concepts (we talked about the difference between one dimensional, two dimensional, and three dimensional), and even irony. Yes, it’s primarily third-grade boy humor, like making the talking toilets throw up by stuffing them with creamed chipped beef from the school cafeteria, but it’s also quite fun.